Spring 2023 Letter to the Community

Springtime is here and as we look forward to the summer, we are so excited to be holding our first weeklong camps in four years! Registration has just opened for both the Mendocino and Iroquois Springs workshops. Don’t delay in registering, and please spread the word. Our board and staff are hard at work to create an amazing camp experience for all of you.

One new thing that we’re happy to finally unveil is a new tiered pricing structure. We’ve been working on this for several years now—we had originally planned to put this pricing structure in place in 2020. The goal of the new pricing structure is to more accurately reflect the actual cost of camp. Our new tuition levels for adult campers are described below. Campers may choose the tuition level that they would like to pay.

• Subsidized: We are happy to offer discounted tuition (below actual cost of camp) to those with limited income. The remaining costs of your stay at camp are covered thanks to our “Pay-It-Forward” campers and fundraising efforts. This tuition is $950 for a full week, the same cost as tuition in 2019.
• Full: This level reflects all the costs of your stay at camp. By paying this tuition, you cover our operating costs. A full week at this level is $1200 for an adult camper.
• Pay-It-Forward: This level covers the cost of your stay at camp and pays it forward for one camper attending at the Subsidized tuition. You will receive a receipt for the tax-deductible donation portion of your payment. A full week at this level is $1450 for an adult camper.

Full details of the new tiered pricing structure can be found on the camp registration pages (see links above). A huge thank you to all the Board, Staff, and Committee members who have helped us to think through this new structure and bring it to life. We’re confident that it will help the EEFC continue to economically sustain our camps for years to come.

We need work exchange campers for both camps! You can learn more about Mendocino work exchanges here and Iroquois Springs work exchanges here.

We have many wonderful teachers at both West Coast and East Coast camps this year—click the links and navigate to the “Teachers” tab to learn all about our world-class teaching staff. We are so grateful for the hard work of the Program Committee over the past several months to put together these great slates of instructors.

We also want to give everyone a quick recap of our recent EEFC Office Hours, held virtually on February 11. Thank you so much to everyone who attended for the very constructive and thoughtful conversation. For those of you who missed it, a recording can be accessed here with the passcode 0sJL26@4. The recording will be available for viewing until June 30, 2023.

The main topic of the office hours was our Covid policies for camp and the recent Covid community survey. We’ve received feedback from several community members about the survey and its role in the Board’s decision making, which has made us realize that we could have done a better job of communicating out about our decision-making process initially, so we wanted to take the opportunity to clarify that.

As many of you who attended our BalkanFest events last year know, we already had a Covid policy in place for our 2022 in-person events, which we had arrived at through a lot of research and looking at best practices from other camps and in-person music events. A number of other similar camps have also required vaccination to attend their in-person camps and events. The purpose of the survey was to understand community sentiment relative to our existing policy, making sure that we were proceeding in a direction to put on camp in a way that is economically viable and as inclusive as possible. The survey was not a vote on what our policy should be, nor were we outsourcing public-health decision making to the community at large—we hope it didn’t appear that was what we were doing through the survey. In addition, we’re happy that the survey also gave us the opportunity to hear many helpful suggestions from the community.

We also want to be sure that folks are aware that we’ve added an additional provision to our Covid policy allowing those who are medically unable to receive a vaccine to instead provide a doctor’s note in lieu of vaccination.

We are committed to keeping camp as safe as possible through a multi-pronged approach of vaccination, masking, and testing. We acknowledge that there isn’t a policy at this point that will meet the needs and desires of every member of the community. We also know that the Covid landscape is constantly changing. While our protocols for this year are already in place, we will re-evaluate those policies every camp year to make sure that they are appropriate and relevant to current public health context, and we will make any changes needed in order to put camp on in a sustainable way.

Thank you all for your ongoing support of the EEFC. We are so grateful to all of our community members who have helped us over the past several years, and we can’t wait to see you all at camp this summer.